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I remember the first kid I babysat for. Cute and precocious, he would gaze into my eyes and ask questions like, “Are you a kid or a mommy?”

I was, I felt, neither. At about 14, I was by no means a parent, but I was considered mature enough to care for the neighborhood’s toddlers and elementary schoolers, microwaving their dinners, playing Hot Wheels, and showing them Teletubbies.

The babysitter occupies sort of a liminal space in kids’ lives — not a nanny or daycare teacher, who might provide more full-time care and education, but someone who comes over for an evening or an afternoon, hangs out for a little while, and then leaves. “You’re supervising kids and implicitly offering them a model of what it’s like to be older and a teen — but you’re not edifying them,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote last year of millennial teen babysitters. “No one asked for my resume.”

Babysitting has changed since Petersen and I did the job in the ’90s. What was once a rite of passage for teens and tweens has become a professionalized job with dedicated apps and a workforce of experienced adults. Parents come to potential sitters with expectations and questions that reflect that increased seriousness, Katherine Goldstein, a journalist and author of the care-focused newsletter The Double Shift, told me. “Are you feeding them the right thing? Are you not letting them watch too much TV? Are you doing approved activities?” she asked.

There are lots of possible reasons for the shift from teen to adult babysitters, from safety concerns to increasingly packed teen schedules. But something is lost, say experts and parents alike, when babysitting becomes a grown-up job with expectations to match.

Taking care of a kid for a few hours can be a formative experience for teens. “Up until a couple years ago, Gracie was very shy, but babysitting encouraged her to use her voice,” Karen Johnson, an author and mom to a 14-year-old sitter, told me in an email. “She had to meet families for the first time and look confident. She also had to learn to state her pay rate and know what her time is worth as a sitter.”

It’s not just the sitters who benefit; kids, too, get something unique out of being watched by someone closer to their age. For young kids, “older kids are just so much more enchanting than adults,” Goldstein said. And resurrecting the culture of........

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